Undoing “the vernacular”: Dismantling structures of raciolinguistic supremacy

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that medieval literary studies must critically reexamine the deployment of the term “vernacular” in its usage concerning late Middle English writing. The term “vernacular” is used to reify and institutionalize the idea of the “standard language,” a concept that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside “monolingualism” and “nationalism,” in order to promote cultural homogeneity and a sense of linguistic wholeness for languages such as English; in turn, non‐English (and other non‐European) languages became “vernaculars” within structures of linguistic supremacy designed to discount the languages of the peoples and places that England colonized and enslaved. By historiographically unpacking where our understandings of “vernacular” languages come from, I chart the ways in which defining “vernacular” languages is intrinsic to the making of race in asserting the inferiority of “vernaculars” as inherent to the supposed inferiority of peoples during the nineteenth century through our contemporary moment and reread moments of “language making” in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale, drawing from sociolinguistics in order to offer alternative vocabularies to “vernacular.”